windows wont allocat drive letter to external drive

Q:windows wont allocat drive letter to external drive

hi there,
i just bought a preowned Seagate Freeagent Goflex,when i plugged it into my usb port windows installed the driver,but when i click on my computer it dosnt show though in disk management it is listed and online,i also have enabled automount and changed it from dynamic to basic.
Im not great on computers and any help would be greatly appreciated i only want to use the new disk for back ups.
Many thanks in advance.
paul.

hi there,
i just bought a preowned Seagate Freeagent Goflex,when i plugged it into my usb port windows installed the driver,but when i click on my computer it dosnt show though in disk management it is listed and online,i also have enabled automount and changed it from dynamic to basic.
Im not great on computers and any help would be greatly appreciated i only want to use the new disk for back ups.
Many thanks in advance.
paul.

A:windows wont allocate drive letter to external drive

Please post a full screenshot of Windows Disk Management with only the Seagate Freeagent GoFlex external drive plugged in. ( Plug out all other external drives). Please read this tutorial and adhere to the guidelines therein to post a full Screenshot disabling Console Tree, Action Pane and adjusting the seperators as necessary to show all information. Disk Management - Post a Screen Capture Image

I have a USB external hard drive that I keep all my documents etc on (had it for years)

I upgraded from Vista Home to & Home Premium then had to upgrade recently to Professional to run my Sage. Through all these upgrades my ext. drive ran fine. Occasionally the drvie letter would change if I had something else plugged into the USB, this was always easily corected in disk management by changing the drive path.

The connection on the case packed up so I had to get the drive put into a new case, now when I plug it in the drive is assigned G instead of F, I tried to change the drive letter allocation in Disk Management but it won't let me as the program still thinks I have a second ext. hard drive which is labelled F. I suspect this has happened because when the usb connection broke the drive was disconnected suddenly instead of a proper eject.

How do I get Disk Management to remove the inactive drive - i can't find any obvious way - eject, delete etc are all missing when I click on tools or tasks.

If there is no easy way then how do I stop program updates for Adobe etc. failing because they can not find the F drive. I don't know why they look at that drive anyway.

Help.

A:External Hard Drive - Drive Letter changed - unable to change back

Hi PAMDILL,

Welcome aboard.

Try this:

Download drivecleanup.zip V 0.8.1 from

Drive Tools for Windows

Unzip to a folder. In it you will have two folders Win32 and x64, each containing DriveCleanup.exe for Windows 32bit and 64 bit respectively.

Now unplug all the USB devices from your PC (except of course the Keyboard and mouse), right click on the appropriate DriveCleanup.exe for your system and run it as an administrator.

This will remove all non-present drives from the registry.

Reboot and then plug-in your external drive.

The drive will be installed and hopefully you should be able to assign any free drive letter to it.

Hi,Bit of background first, my old harddrive , which was split into C and D ,approx. 500 gig each, went Kaput,had it replaced with an SSD(at my request because I heard they don't overheat and are faster) by an experienced computer technician, and no longer having to deal with split drives suited me fine.I only have half the storage space now, about 500Gg in comparison to 1,000 Gg, but cost was a factor at the time, SSD's being so expensive.Very happy with the new SSD, speed etc. My operating system is Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit , SP1. My backups were all stored on a Goflex external harddrive, which the technician accidentally dropped on the floor, he then replaced this with an external drive with an on/off switch. (Pleased about the on/off switch, the other didn't have one, very upset about the dropping my other one). All working fine, doing my backups to my new external drive he gave me, using my Acronis True Image software 2015 version, that I had always used.My old external drive was set up to drive E, and all my previous backups in Acronis show drive E, so perhaps this is why the technician set this new one up to Drive F, not sure.And maybe this is why I got the error message below? Well, in my infinite wisdom (which with computer technology isn't great I must admit) I suddenly decided I wanted to backup to an external drive with the letter E,(E for External seemed so much mor... Read more

I don't use Acronis, but if you think changing the drive letter caused a problem, can't you just change it back? The Administrative Tools applet of the Control Panel is what I've always used to change drive letters. Changing the name (I assume you mean the drive label) should have no effect.

i may not know enough about the problem to completly describe it...but i will begin......an 80 gig external hard drive was given to me..it was rebuilt on a win 2000 system....my home edition of win xp--reconginzes it....as disk 1- in disk manager....however it is not formatted or able to be found, and does not have a drive letter assigend to it... i logged on as "administrator" ...in safe mode, to see if i could get the drive path settings option to come up in disk manager ...i could not-------does any of this make any sense to anyone?.......that option still does not come up..under user or administrator...in disk managment--so it is unformatted and has no drive letter......thus xp cannot find it......

STEP 1: CHECK POWER (click for expanded instructions further down the page)

Verify that the drive light and the light on the AC adapter (power supply) is illuminated normally.
It is sometimes necessary to contact Technical Support for troubleshooting and/or possibly to replace the power supply if it behaves unusually.

STEP 2: CHECK CABLING (click for expanded instructions further down the page)

Confirm that your USB/Firewire cable is firmly connected in a port that is on the rear of your desktop computer (if you have a desktop).
Try another USB or Firewire port.
If your drive is powered only by USB, such as the FreeAgent Go, the Maxtor OneTouch mini, and the Seagate Portable drive, then the drive's cable has two USB connectors. Try connecting both of the free USB connectors into a USB port for maximum power availability.
Avoid connecting the drive via a USB hub for now.

STEP 3: WINDOWS SERVICE PACKS

Follow these instructions to ensure that your installation of Windows XP/2000 has been updated to the latest Windows Service Pack.

Right-click on My Computer and choose Properties.

The System Properties window will appear. On the General tab (which will be at the front), see the "System:" information.

F is assigned to a drive that does not exist and never has. I am confused. I only have one CD drive and it says now that I have 2 even though the one addressed as F doesn't have any information. If I click on F it says "Insert Disk"

i can't get my puter to read the data on an external hard drive. wants me to format it even though it recognizes the drive letter i gave it when i did format it. don't want to lose the 100+ gigs of data i have on this drive.

A:my computer recognizes the drive letter but not the data on external hard drive

Does the external drive work on another machine?

Also, while the drive is still connected, can you go into Device Manager (right-click My Computer, click on 'Manage...', click on 'Device Manager') to check for any yellow exclamation marks or red crosses next to anything in there?

I have an old BYTECC hard drive enclosure. Trying to use it on an older XP system for back up. Got a bunch of 40G hard drives I can use.

The OS will detect the external drive is connected and powered up, arrow shows in the tray for a USB drive, checked the device manager and it sezs the drive is there and operating properly, recognizes it, but does not assign a drive letter.

AIDA32 sezs it is there but same deal shows no drive letter.

I've tried four different hard drives with the same results. I know the hardware works on other computers, this particular computer USB works with other canned external drives, it reads a flash memory stick as a drive no problem. I know the BYTECC is set up properly, should be the same as with other computers. Works ok on a Win2000 system.

What could be the problem? Is there something to tweak? I do know this XP system would not read hard drives that had been formatted on non-XP computers before. Don't exactly know what systems all these drives were formatted on. Isn't making any sense to me at the moment. Doing it just like I did on the Win2000 system with other drives, everything worked as it should.

Thinking I could try to slap one of the drives in as a slave and try to format it that way, hopefully can get it to be read as a USB drive instead.

Any help greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

A:Solved: External hard drive not assigned a drive letter

If the drive shows up in Disk Management (Start/Run/diskmgmt.msc/OK), right-click the drive icon or the area showing the drive below, select "Change drive letter and paths". In the next window click "Add". Next window click the radio button for "Assign the following drive letter". Select a drive letter. Click OK.

I have a wierd problem that most of the suggestions seem not to work.I have a HP computer with Vista basic installed at factory with no disc sent with computer. I then added an external drive on which I installed Ubuntu OS as the primary boot drive. This was needed while I was learning and using Asterisk. Now I do not need the drive which no longer seems to have a letter designation or Ubuntu OS but cannot seem to be able to use System Recovery. Near as I can tell, I need to reset the Master Boot Record back to Vista only but seem unable to do so as I recieved no disks with the Computer.Any suggestions. I am not extremely skilled at computer technical stuff so please assume I am an idiot if responding.

I have a LaCie Porsche Design P9223 Slim External 500GB USB3Hard Drive that my father was using on his computer (with no problem). We're both running Windows 7. My computer, a Dell Studio XPS9000, won't recognize it in "My Computer". There's no drive letter!

It shows up in Device Manager ( says, "this device is working properly")Show up in USB Safely RemoveShows up in Devices and PrintersShows up in Disk Management as Unknown/Unitialized, Disk 10. (When I right click and try to initialize it, it says "Device is not ready".)The Driver is up to dateIt works when I attach it to my husband's laptop, running Windows XP.

I am running Windows 7 Pro. Have a external dual dock connected to a estata port. One of the drives assigned letter K often comes up as E and I have to change as application is looking for K. Another disk in this dock works fine. No problems. Does anyone know why this might be happening or anyway to prevent?Seems like when I go to disk management and assign K it should stay that way.

A:External Sata drive will not keep assigned drive letter

Quote: Originally Posted by Terrym

I am running Windows 7 Pro. Have a external dual dock connected to a estata port. One of the drives assigned letter K often comes up as E and I have to change as application is looking for K. Another disk in this dock works fine. No problems. Does anyone know why this might be happening or anyway to prevent?Seems like when I go to disk management and assign K it should stay that way.

I don't have details on what was done to change the drive letter, because I wasn't the one that did this. But here's an overview of the results:

The removable drive shows up in explorer with its new drive letter, however when you click on it, Windows (using Vista and 7) says that it must be formatted before use- checking the drive properties shows a wrong hard drive size.

I'm thinking there are 2 ways of resolving the situation:

1. getting an outside program that will access the drive and allow me to copy the files to a different drive (then formatting the removable drive) or 2.somehow getting Windows to recognize the files on the removable drive.

If anyone knows what software I can use to access and copy the files on the drive or how to get Windows to recognize the drive that it used to recognize normally, I'd appreciate it.

Hi, I have an Asus n61 notebook & a 1tb WD external drive connected via esata. I want my notebook to recognize the drive as G, for program pathway reasons, but as it needs to be connected before power up my system sees it as F. When I try to 'change drive letter' in Disk Management it simply says 'the parameter is incorrect'. I have never had problems assigning drive letters in XP. What is the secret in W7? Thanks.

I purchased an external USB2 hard drive case (that has a power cable and USB output cable) and installed a 120GB Seagate drive. It seems like my laptop (running XP, USB1) will recognize the drive when I plug it in (as an USB Mass Storage device) but it does not give it a drive letter (like E) for me to access it. I have tried changing the Master, Slave, Cable Select jumper on the drive with no success. When I plug in a USB thumb drive, my laptop assigns a drive letter and I can access it via Windows Explorer with no problems, but with the 120 GB external drive, I have no luck? The drive shows up under the Control Panel.....Device Manager as a hard drive just under my laptop drive, but there is no way to store files on this external drive. Any suggestions?

A:USB External Hard drive - no drive letter

Hello and welcome... You may need to configure the drive in winXP for it to be seen properly.

I am setting up a new computer running Windows 7 Pro 64-bit. I attached an old 500GB USB 2.0 hard drive. System notification showed the driver was successfully installed. However when I looked for the drive in Windows Explorer, it did not show up under Computer.

I ran Microsoft's Computer Management application. Under Disk Management, I see that the drive does not have a drive letter (see attached screenshot). However when I right-click on the drive, the option to assign a drive letter is grayed out. I searched Microsoft's documentation, but the only reason I could find for not being able to assign a drive letter would be if the disk was a system partition or boot partition. But this is just an ordinary HDD that I want to use for backups. What am I doing wrong?

A:Cannot add a drive letter to an external hard drive

Try to reformat it with NTFS if there is nothing on it. Use Partition Wizard free if Disk Management won't

I have a new 0.5 TB external drive that came with my new IMac. I formatted the external drive as FAT32 on my IMac.

When I plug it into my XP, I cannot get it to come up under "My Computer".

It is listed under systems/hardware/device manager with the other USB devices.

Under administrative tools/computer management/storage/disk management it appears as "Disk 5". It was not initialized but I have done that.

However, it doesn't have a letter drive. All it says is "Basic" and is listed as online. Under properties of the drive I can't see anything that appears off (though I am admittedly ignorant about this stuff). It also will not let me right click to change the drive letter, as I can with the USB drives. The only option under right click is properties and help.

As part of our 2003 server backup system, we do a copy of data onto a usb external hard drive. The fixed drives are c:\, d:\ for the CD and m:\ for our data. Most of the time, when we attach the external hard drive, it is allocated as the e:\ drive, which is what I would expect.

However, sometimes it is allocated as the f:\ drive, which obviously messes up the backup program.

It occurs to me that if the usb drives are swapped too quickly, Windows still thinks something is on e:\ and allocates f:\ but we tried doing it with a couple of minutes gap and it still allocated f:\.

Is there any way to fix the drive letter or it is always up to Windows to pick the drive letter it feels like?

Hi,I have an external 1TB-USB-HD, which is shown in the WIN adminstration of drives, but the option "assign drive letter" is grey. I use this drive since a year, formerly it was recognized without problems. The device manager recognizes it, the driver is actual. The PC further has one internal HD (C: , two DVD-drives(D:, E: and a cardreader with for drives (K:, L:, J:, M: . Because I had problems with this, I sometimes use an external cardreader, which uses N:, G:, H:, I:I connected the external HD to another Win8.1-PC with only a drive C:. It shows the same problems.What to do?

A:no drive letter for external USB-HD

Is it USB 2.0 or 3.0? This can happen if you plug it into another slot.

Hey all. I was wondering if anyone knows an answer to my frustrations. I have all my music on an external hard drive, along with my movies, tv shows, etc, much the same as a lot of people do these days. However, I have these problems occasionally that I don't see why Microsoft doesn't just fix. I have two external HDDs, right? OK, I unplug both, restart the computer, and plug them in in the wrong order, for whatever reason, that what was E: becomes F: and what was F: becomes E:. Now, why doesn't the same HDD keep the same drive letter! Every time i plug them in wrong I have to go into storage management and change the drive letters around which seems like a waste of time, just to get my music player to find my library. Does Windows have something built in to get around this? Or is there an application that can manage my hard drives letters? I understand Microsoft issues out drive letters in the order of which they are mounted. But is there something that can bypass that and make them stay the same every bootup? Thanks!

Alright so i wanted to set my External Hard Drive letter to K because my iTunes XML library file recognizes all my music being on path K:\ and so on.

Can anyone figure out what's up? Please.

I have an idea it might because of my 5-in-1 card reader but in my XP OS it showed them by default under the "My Computer" option regardless of there being a card or not. Do you think that in 7 a card actually has to be present for it to have shown up?

A:Why can't I change my External HD to Drive Letter K?

I you go to folder options in the control panel got o the "view" tab and check the box to show hidden folders, files and drives....you may find that a card reader or something else already has that letter in use.

Hi, I have a Samsung SSD PM841 om my Dell Latitude E6430, i7 3.0Ghz, 16GB DDR3, Win 7 Pro, 64-bit, laptop. I have a 250 GB powered external HD attached to it. In 'My Computer' there is no drive letter for it. When I click on SSD c: then properties,
then hardware, it is shown in that drive, (like it's a partition of that c: drive). Also, d: is my 'recovery', a partition on c: drive. I want to move some of my files onto my external HD, but I cannot do it. When I highlight a file, then click on 'send to',
there is no drive letter for my external HD. Seems like my computer is making the external HD part of c: drive only, not a drive on its own. I have never had a problem hooking up external HD's before, but I very new to SSD's and I'm at a standstill on how
to fix this problem. I've tried what others have said, in windowsforum/windows_7, but with no results. I believe there's a simple solution for my problem, can anyone help me?...Thanks, Forrest

I have XPpro w/sp2 and have been using this external 200gb drive for about 2 years and I also hook up a 5/in/1 card reader to the front USB. Just the other day I went to use the external 200gb drive and it was not there. I checked Disk Managment and it shows up as (Disk 1) Basic 189.90GB online BUT no letter for the drive. It says it is "Unallocated". I tryed it on 2 other machines and same thing. How can I get to the data on this disk?

A:External USB HD not showing up with a drive letter?

Only things you can try are jumpering the drive a slave to a master hard drive on a pc and see if you can read the data. Beyond that, time to try data recovery software.http://www.pcinspector.de/file_recovery/UK/welcome.htm

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I have a drive that has a lot of information on it that I need. A user left our company and all of his files are on this drive. I was handed it and asked to build a VM with all his information on it. When I plug the drive in it loads the drivers and shows
up just fine in Computer Management (shown below), but not in Computer. So I think, ok, I'll just add a drive letter but that option is greyed out and won't let me. The disk is initialized and appears to be healthy. I have gone to device manager and made sure
there were no problems there as well. It was also an external drive so I removed it and made it an internal drive on my machine but got the same results. It shows up in BIOS but obviously can't boot off of it since it is not an OS drive.
Deleting/formatting the drive is not an option. Is there a way to get this drive accessible without that? Deleting it is the exact opposite of what I want done here.
Thanks!

Here are the facts:
I put no floppy drive in my computer when I built it.
I forgot my admin password.
I downloaded a program to recover the password.
The program requires a floppy disk.
I plug my external floppy disk drive in.
The batch program is set to execute on the A: drive.
My external floppy disk drive is the B: drive.
There is nothing in the A: drive.
My USB floppy disk drive will not show up on the disk management scren.

Is there some way I can change the letter of my external floppy drive? I have no cds here, so I can't download that version of the program.

A:Change the letter of external floppy drive?

See if you can disable the floppy device in your bios. Even though you don't have a floppy drive internally, the controller is still there so the bios and operating system reserver A: for the drive letter. You might be able to disable the floppy drive in the bios but I doubt it. See if you can use the subst command I doubt that will work if you are booting from a boot disk though.
subst a: b:

i having a same problem, but is server, my server is HP Proliant ML150 G3,
i wonder install window server 2003, after boot to CD i press F6 install additional driver, and it show insert a floppy disk to drive A, but after i put my floppy disk and press enter, it show the same thing ask to insert floppy disk, i suspect it can't recognize external floppy drive as drive A, i havent install window yet, how i know external floppy drive letter and change the letter, some one please reply me as soon as possible, urgent, thanks

A:Change the letter of external floppy drive?

Zion880818 - Ditch the external floppy drive on this one. Break down and spend ten bucks on an internal floppy or borrow one from another machine. It takes 5 minutes or less to install and will rid you of your aggravation.
Sometimes the easiest solution is plain as day.

Note that assigning the drive letter of an external drive writes a "hash" signature to the MBR of the drive, that's how Windows knows what drive letter it is. If you take it to another system and also assign the drive letter, it'll overwrite the signature and you'll lose the drive letter assignment on the first system.

I've seen a few problems identical to mine, except the fix seemingly isn't allowed. I'm hoping for some guidance.

I have a WD800 HDD from my previous desktop I'm trying to access (Win 2000).I bought an IDE/USB adaptor and plugged it into my new desktop (Vista.) All seems to be working (disk spins up, new hardware found, USB mass storage device ready) but the drive doesn't show up in "My Computer." It does show up in both Device Manager and Disk Management. In Disk Managment is shows up with no drive letter. The previous fixes I have seen suggested changing the drive letter and that seemed to solve it. That where my problem starts - right-clicking only gives me the option "delete volume." The "change drive letter" is there but grayed out and inaccessible.I do have admin right under both OS's.

I have an external USB floppy drive that got assigned the drive letter B when it was plugged into one of the usb ports on the back of my PC.

I need to change it to letter A. The drive is not listed under computer management: disk management. Removing the drive and reinstalling does not chhange the drive letter. Removing the driver in device managerresults in installing new hardware, but with drive letter B. The Bios has several settings releated to usb devices--but nothing to do with drive letters.

so I am at a loss of how to fix this---any help would be most apreciated

I have a USB3 external drive that I use for backups. It works A-OK. But every time I plug it in I have to use Disk Management to assign it a drive letter. Is there some driver or option in WIn7-64 I need to find/tweak?

I recently formatted my 1TB Seagate External HDD to FAT32 to backup and redo my PS3. I reformatted it on my Windows 8 laptop easy peasy, but my windows 7 desktop will not recognize it as a drive with a letter to access it. If I uninstall the drive in device manager it will reinstall, be recognized as a general drive and in that small instance it is accessible, but then it gets fully installed and is recognized as BUP Slim BK. It doesn't see any info for the drive or even know that there is a valid partition on it.

Any help to get this drive working again is much appreciated.

A:PC recognizes External HDD. No drive letter assigned.

If THIS is your drive and Seagate software governs it...I'd say that the software for the drive may need to be installed/reinstalled.

I have no problem changing the different drive letters individually. Lets say the black one is allocated Drive F. When I disconnect the black one, and connect the silver one, it thinks it is Drive F too, so I rename it to G, then disconnect it and reconnect the black one only to find it is now G as well.

When I connect both to the laptop, the first one connects as say Drive F but when I connect the second one as well, it seems to think its F also but the Drive letter cannot be changed while both are connected. I also can only read the first drive, and the second one has no drive letter assigned to it.

The silver one is formatted to Fat32 and the Black one if formatted to NTFS although I don't believe that matters.

What I would like to do is copy all the files from silver to black, then format the silver one to NTFS.

I have a situation that isn't really a major problem, but is slightly annoying, and somewhat puzzling.

I have an external 1TB Iomega USB hard drive on my system. It is set to be Drive Y. Most of the time, everything is fine. But occasionally, after I boot the system, I'll get the pop up on the screen asking me what I want to do with Drive J. And yes, the "new" Drive J is, indeed, really my Iomega external drive. I can go into Disk Management, and reassign the drive letter back to Y, and everything is fine again.

Sometimes, it keeps the Y drive letter for several months at a time. But other times, the system treats it as a new drive and assigns drive letter J to it--in anywhere from a few days to several months after the previous time.

As I said, it doesn't happen often enough to be a problem, but I'm curious as to what causes it. Anyone have any insights into this little puzzle?

A:Changing External Hard Drive Letter

Look in your registry under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices. That's where drive letter assignments are stored. Find \DosDevices\Y: on the left side and note the data value on the right. The next time it happens, check the same registry location but find \DosDevices\J: and see if the data value is the same as before. Also see if there's still an entry for \DosDevices\Y:.

I have a Toshiba laptop (Pent IV, 512 RAM, 60 GB HD) running XP Home SP2. I recently purchase a Maxtor 200GB HD and an external USB enclosure. After installing the drive in the enclosure and plugging in the USB it looks like it is recognized (says Maxtor drive recognized, driver is installed, new hardware ready to use), but it is not assigned a letter when I click on "my computer" so I can't do anything with it.

After reading an earlier thread, I attempted to format the drive by: clicking on My Computer, clicked "manage", and "disk management". In the main window of this screen only my C: drive is listed. In the drop down list below the main window are listed: disk 0 - C:, and then under that disc 1 - unallocated 189.93GB, then under that my CD/DVD. If I right click on dick 1 I do not get an option to format - only "properties" and "help". In "properties" under the "general" tab it says "Device is working properly".

I have a new 120 gig external USB drive (105G free). It installed and seems to work fine except:My prior system had hard drives C: and D:cd reader drive E:DVD/cd RW drive F:four-way card reader G:, H:, I:, J: (these came and went depending if card reader was left plugged to the PC)The new external installed correctly as drive K: and I succesfully backed up a zilllion photos.

After shutting down/startup the drive assignments redefine as C: and E: Hard drivesD: as new external 105 GIG freeF: as CD readerG: as DVD/CDRH: as a second identical new external 105 GIG free (duplicates drive DThe four way card reader is unplugged-ran out of USP plugs.

I have two problems:1. The duplicate external drive assignment is obviously wrong but I cannot make it go away.2. I cannot make a backup program work correctly since the drive assignment keeps changing.

How can I "lock in" the hard drive and CD assignments so the external drive doesn't jump in the middle of that alphabet. I want the External drive to always be assigned some higher alpha letter so I can use it on different computers.

the system is a dual boot with win 7 and xp and windows 7 had assigned c to be system reserved and xp wont installa nd call its self c it is installing to be the f drive. now this is screwing with the sales software that needs to be loaded into the machine it will not install because its trying to install to c. disk management will not allow me to change the drive letters from windows xp it says windows cannot modify the drive letter of your system volume or boot volume. what can i do? am i going to have to reformat again to install xp first before i install 7?

A:[SOLVED] xp wont install to be drive letter c.

I don't know much about dual booting 7 and XP as I've never needed to (I've been able to successfully run all of my older programs under Windows 7 Pro's XP compatibility) but the article below seems to be well written and might be worth perusing until a Windows tech comes online. The second section explains how to install XP after Windows 7.

I have Toshiba Satellite, in case that matters. I have drive C, D, E of course. I also have 2 external hard drives. G is for movies only. F is for backup. Anyway, yesterday I noticed that the letter F wasn't showing when I clicked on Computer. I went into Disk Management and tried to assign a letter but I saw 3 G letters. One was fine but the other two confused me. I tried to change each one but the letter F was missing. In frustration I deleted that drive. Well, now I can't get it back. What do I do? BTW, I see the two externals in Device Manager and I think I see one in MiniTool Partition but the drive in question is marked as Unallocated.Can you help me? All my important backups are on there.

My problem is a bit of a strange one although I'm hoping someone can help. I have a 4gb Compact Flash Card housed in a Datel Media Dock (that connects to a Nintendo DS Lite). When I connect this dock to my PC via USB cable (to download movies, mp3's etc) the pc will 'ding' to recognise I have connected it, it will also show in device manager, it even shows in the 'safely remove hardware' icon in the task bar but it cant be seen in Win Explorer. It cannot be seen in Disk Management either. I know that the CF card is good because taken out of the Media Dock it is seen by my media card reader and I can load/unload fine. I know that the cable is good, the card is good, and the Media Dock works fine in my Nintendo DS. This exact same problem happens with my laptop using all the same gear. Its as if the PC can see it but doesnt want me to do anything with it. the manufacturer of the doc (Datel) have been no help. I'm desperate for ideas, anybody got one?

My USB disc comes up with the letter 'J'. Because I have references to it with a letter 'X'. I want to change it and I do that in the Computer Management tool with the Disk Management utility.

Computer - Right click - Computer ManagementDisk Manegement - Right-click the drive and then click Change Drive Letter and PathsAssigne a new letter

Everything works fine but suddenly after a reboot Windows 8 loses the letter 'X' for this disc and assignes 'J' again.I have done so with this drive for years under Windows 7 without any problems. Any idea, please what the problem might be?

A:Drive letter assigned to external USB disc changes random

Hello Senki, and welcome to Eight Forums.

While you have the USB drive connected, double check using OPTION TWO in the tutorial below to see if "J" is still listed. If so, change it to use "X" instead.Drive Letter - Add, Change, or Remove in Windows 7 - Windows 7 Forums

I turned the computer on today and one of the external hard drives has changed from 'K' to 'L'. Two other external hard drives have not been affected. For some reason the 'K' drive has been allocated to the CD Drive (which was previously 'F').

So how can I get 'K' back to the external hard drive using the same path as before. It doesn't matter what the CD drive is called but getting it back to 'F' would be nice.

I have data on an external hdd which I would like to access from my laptop. I have a program that points to the data. My external hdd gets a different letter from xp at different times. It does not help assigning a new letter because I have to reboot for the letter change to take effect (or so it seems) and the drive letter can change on boot up. Is there a way that I can assign the external drive to have a permanent drive letter?

When I am in windows explorer and my drive letters are in the right side pane of the window...(IE clicking on My Computer in the left pane shows all drive in the right pane..) Instead of opening up that drive's folders, it pops up the search window.

Before I had just clicked on the drive and it expanded out and you could click on the files on that drive.

Anyone know what might cause this to change or what I can do to change it back?

I cannot get windows 7 to find it! When I plug in the USB cable the balloon comes up to say it has been installed, I can see it on My Computer for about 1 or 2 minutes then it drops off. It isnt listed in my hardware or anything.

Its not found in Disk Management or My Devices so it isnt a case of changing the drive letter - i cant find the drive to change it.

I have also tried to find the upper and lower settings in regedit....couldnt find them so couldnt delete them as advised in other posts of this nature.

It is set to master, the IDE connector and power connectors are fine. Its gotta be a windows 7 problem cause it does show up very breifly. In the minute or 2 its there I cant do anything with it...it just hangs although it will open and close. Ive googled it and cant find anything...mainly registry issues but they didnt help.

Ive also connected it up to another laptop with XP and had no problems so I know the DVD Rom works fine and all the cables are ok.

Ive tried in all 4 USB ports on my laptop and also turned off all energy settings...all with no luck. And I also have EVERY windows 7 update...

Heres exactly what happens from power off on the enclosure.

1 - I plug in the USB lead then turn on power to the enclosure.2 - I quickly go to Start, Computer and I can see the DVD Rom... Read more

A:Windows 7 Wont Detect External DVD Drive

i also have the same problem some post it is mentioned you have to switch off your system and ten plug the external drive.I still have to test this.Have you fixed your system.

i have windows 7 desktop. there are some partition on it.but there is problem with these partition. All the three partition have the same drive letter.i attach a link showing the picture. all three partitions are dynamic , simple. if i open these drives only the contents of one drive are appeared. another two drive data are not shown in any manner.

i don't want to lose any data from any drive ......
please help me sir...
my windows is installed in c:\ drive which is also dynamic and there are no recent changes.only one change i did which is i shrink dynamic volume 50 GB from 206 GB and again mixed with 206 GB without allocating free space.

and only the c drive is on and d drive is off.but in my other desktop same configuration exist.
please help me...and please don't say change and remove drive letter...........waiting for response

A:changing one drive letter all 3 partitions change to that drive letter

First thing you're going to do is fill in the specs of the desktop whose snips you are showing us.

Then you're going to do the same with the second pc opening a second post with snips. Give it a different title like "Second pc with drive letters the same". Don't forget the snips.

You should not have dynamic disks in either machine. What did you do to accomplish this?

There exists a bevy of spectacular experts on this site that will be happy to help you. But give us ALL the info please.

Sadly I had to join here due to a problem with my 2 week old win 7 64 install.

I'm not sure what the trigger was but my C drive where my os is installed apparently took the drive letter of an external drive that I use for backup. It is now the X drive and I cannot boot. I do get the repair screen but cannot repair as there is no operating system to choose. Booting from windows disk makes no difference here.

My bios (uefi) can see the disk, I can also see it from the command prompt, Im at a loss what to do, any help is appreciated.

I believe this happened after an automatic windows update.

A:Drive letter randomly changed, OS wont boot

By the way, this is a newly built computer, clean install on a new hdd. Running fine for last 2 weeks.

I've bought a Freecom USB 2.0 Hard Drive XS 1TB (Model Code SSYBBA) which came FAT32 preformatted. I wanted to reformat to use NTFS so I plugged it in to my USB port. Opening Windows Explorer, the drive was picked up as G:\ and I could view files on there and copy and remove files so I knew the disk was working OK.

I started reformatting by right-clicking on the drive letter and selecting "Format" from the menu and select NTFS and kept the default settings. After an hour I cancelled the formatting (clicked Cancel) and a message popped up asking me to confirm, so I did.

Since doing this, the drive is now no longer recognised and doesn't get a drive letter assigned. I've tried rebooting, reconnecting and checking in Disk Management and it just doesn't appear (although is powering up when the laptop starts). Also, Device Manager doesn't show it. Screen shot of Disk Management attached.

Can you tell me, how do I get the drive letter back to restart reformatting?